REVIEW: Dark Angel: The Ascent

- By Allan Lear

I’m not a huge fan of reality television, but there are moments of it which transcend the genre and sweep their way across the cultural landscape, becoming part of the national consciousness. Even if you don’t watch the show and have never seen the episode, we all remember those classic moments of reality telly greatness. Like when Gill Ha’penny won the first series of Strictly Come Dancing because she’d trained as a professional dancer at stage school. Or when John Sergeant had to quit Strictly Come Dancing because all the nation’s husbands – who hated watching the show and only put up with it so they could have Doctor Who on after – kept voting him in, because he was making such an unholy mockery of the whole thing, god bless him. Or when American wrestler Owen “The Rocket” Hart fell off the gantry and died, and all the people around the ring wouldn’t move for the St John’s Ambulance people because they thought he’d just dropped a mannequin of himself into the ring. Talk about laugh.

One of those exceptional reality moments that I’m sure is burned into many of our memories is the first audition of Susan Boyle in Pop Idol or The X Factor or Britain’s Got Issues. Onto the stage she blunders, looking a bit like someone who runs an amateur cat sanctuary and hasn’t really thought to tidy herself up for the telly, and Simon Cowell scrunches up his hateful face because he can’t wait to have a mean-spirited shout at another harmless eccentric who’s never done a thing in their life worse than knitting socks for their teddy bear. Then Susan opens her gob and, instead of an agonized ululation, she belts out a rendition of that song from Les Mis which, if you close your eyes, could pretty much have come off any cast recording of Les Mis.

Then the camera flicks back to Simon. And Mr Piss-on-Your-Daydreams Cowell is trying to mime like he’s pleasantly surprised, but mainly he looks gobsmacked and a bit annoyed, like a chimp who’s just had his banana taken off him by a smaller, cheekier, infinitely more loveable chimp. It’s a glorious moment of inverted expectation, where a nasty little man who makes his living flogging schadenfreude to the huddled masses is hoist by his own petard, and it illustrates a peculiar aspect of the British character, which is this: nothing wrong-foots and confounds the British more than having every expectation of hating something which then turns out to be rather good. It makes us feel angry and embarrassed, because we know we’ve been caught out being not the fair-minded and tolerant people which we hold up as our ideal myth of self, but as the judgemental little bastards we all secretly know we are deep down.

Luckily, I had no such problems with Dark Angel: The Ascent, which is every bit the pissing disgrace that first impressions would suggest.

The film starts off with a glimpse of the bowels of Dante’s Inferno, so I suppose it at least gives the viewer fair warning. Hell appears to be populated solely by Americans, which seems a bit harsh even if they did vote Dubya in twice. Its demonic inhabitants speak in the sort of high formal English which scriptwriters effect in order to make people sound like they’re talking exclusively in excerpts from the King James Bible. This is unfortunate, because the actors employed have evidently not done a great deal of Shakespeare either professionally or while at drama school, and they are completely flummoxed by having to deliver dialogue that is not written in the modern vernacular idiom. This is why they got Kenneth Branagh to direct Thor, so that the actors would have the benefit of his RADA-trained expertise in the complexities of poetic dialogue. For some reason DA:TA was unable to attract Sir Ken, so the acting on display here just sucks.

In fact, the thespianism is deplorably ropey throughout the entire film. What stands out most about the performances for me is that, while every actor is incompetent, each actor is incompetent in his or her own way, which suggests a lack of unifying directorial vision or even control. Our heroine, the titular Dark Angel, as played by Victoria Featherstone (who, the publicity repeatedly tells us, was once in Friends – as though that were some sort of high watermark for affecting human drama), appears to have had all her emotions surgically removed. Featherstone leads about a third of the cast in underplaying her part to the point of non-existence, perhaps on the perfectly reasonable rationale that melodrama must be played straight in order to avoid inviting incredulity.

Regrettable, a second tranche of actors, represented initially by Nicholas Worth as Featherstone’s demonic father, have taken the opposite tack. Clearly considering that the script is sufficiently ludicrous that it can only be intended as comedy, these stalwarts overplay every line until their slightest conjunction is bouncing off the rafters. Worth himself, no mean actor in his own right, succeeds in making his contribution quite funny, but in contrast to the lifeless acting of the star most of this group just make themselves look like hysterical paranoiacs in desperate need of beta blockers and some breathing exercises.

The third subset of actors simply can’t act, end of.

After a brief sojourn in Hades where we learn, thanks to clever camerawork, that despite being an immortal hellspawned succubus, Featherstone has at some stage needed a BCG vaccination (sadly this is never explained), our protagonista pops out into the real world, lingeringly nude and accompanied by a dog, and is promptly run over by a car because the devils of hell don’t know how the modern world works despite presumably having invented much of it. Keep an eye on the dog, he’s a hero.

Our injured heroine promptly falls in love with her casualty doctor, Max (Daniel Markel), whom she declares to be “the purest soul she has ever known”; of course, as she resides in the netherworld, the bar for purity amongst her associates is set rather low, as Max proves pretty rapidly by knobbing his patient. In the throes of passion, Featherstone reverts to her demonic form, which is her plus some rather good prosthetic wings. Max, being a doctor, takes this pretty much in his stride. For “pure” read “incurious”, I guess. Mind you, he can’t be that good in the sack; Featherstone hasn’t burst a single one of her fresh stitches.

Featherstone’s passion for Max is matched only for her passion for retribution against the debauched souls of the sinning multitude. She knows no law but god’s law, which is why she goes about murdering the holy flip out of people for various crimes. Weirdly this seems to include drug offences, which I’m pretty sure aren’t covered by the New Covenant of Grace, though admittedly there’s probably something in Leviticus that prohibits the ingestion of any substance with fewer than forty legs.

Anyway, she goes about knocking hell out of criminals and feeding them to her dog. Did I mention the dog? Oh, that dog. I love that bloody dog. That dog is the best actor in the entire stupid film. Every time it’s on screen the scene gets a positive lift, as all the pettyfogging halfwits with forged SAG cards stop their fannying around and watch a professional at work. I believed that dog, every second. Like I say, a hero.

Sadly the film is about humans or, at least, bipeds. Having been pursued by two cops – one of whom can’t act and one of whom can’t stop acting – Featherstone is mortally (immortally?) wounded. God sends a cardboard standee of…some woman or other…to tell Max that only the waters of the River Styx can heal her. That’s right, the River Styx, of not-even-slightly-from-the-Bible fame. Aha! thinks your reviewer, sensing a clever twist ending – famously, whoever drinks the waters of the River Styx loses their memory forever. Featherstone will go back to tormenting gits in hell, forever dissatisfied, and Max will mourn her loss. Then, if he keeps boning half-dead patients before they’ve even finished their course of antibiotics, they’ll be reunited in hell and she won’t know who he is.

Sadly, that clever twist ending is obviously too clever for the Dark Angel team. Instead, there’s a somewhat rushed happy ending which ties up none of the loose ends.

If I had to sum up Dark Angel: The Ascent it would be in a sentence that, ironically, Simon Mock-The-Afflicted Cowell could have uttered himself. I would say: well…at least there’s a dog in it.

- By Allan Lear